Exhibition Catalogue--2

By Author: chinee
Total Articles: 11
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Giants
In recent decades, exhibition catalogues have grown to prodigious sizes and may be the most comprehensive sources for even rather large subject areas. Probably the largest to be produced were in the 1970s in a competitive spree by Italian provinces and German lander to promote the significance of their region by mounting huge exhibitions on the period when its cultural production was at its peak. A typical example is the three-volume Die Parler und der sch?ne Stil 1350-1400. Europ?ische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern from Cologne of 1978, with a further two volumes published in 1980 on a colloqium held in conjunction with the exhibition. The three volumes covering the exhibition proper amount to over a thousand pages and it would have been unfeasible to have taken them into the exhibition itself. Another example is The History of Japanese Photography, 432 pages long and with over four hundred plates.
This trend was led in Britain by the Royal Academy of Arts and in the USA by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Japanese catalogues
Japanese exhibition ...
... catalogues often provide captions, a certain amount of text, or both in a second language (usually English), and occasionally also a smaller amount in a third language. This is not always so: the large catalogue (over 360 pages) for a major exhibition of the wood-block artist Yasunori Taninaka is in Japanese alone. Meanwhile Works by 25 Photographers in their 20s is completely bilingual, Japanese and English.
The great majority of Japanese exhibition catalogues are only available directly from the galleries or museums that host or hosted the exhibitions. These catalogues are acquired and shelved by libraries together with other books and are available on the used book market, but lack ISBNs. However, exceptions do exist: the catalogue of an exhibition of the photographs of Nakaji Yasui was produced via an independent publisher and distributed as a regular book.